so much present inside my past

the summer after i graduated from high school, i took a trip with Sarah and Katie to the Newport Folk Festival—a real pilgrimage for anyone who grew up on good songwriting or kept collections of concert playlists and ticket stubs. in so many ways, it was the ultimate road trip, complete with mix-tapes, camping out, a million inside jokes and a map of every vegetarian restaurant between Nashville and New England. we packed so many miles onto the wheels of my little white Volvo and racked up an obscene amount of roaming charges on my mom’s car phone. but despite these things, it was an incredible trip together.

someone brought dozens of sheets of little ladybug stickers for the ride and before we’d left Tennessee, we’d started putting one on ordinary things we passed along the way that were made special for us by our encounter with them—public toilets, payphones, restaurant booths, road signs, gas pumps, license plates and sometimes people. the stickers were such a real part of that whole experience that it seems like we would have had some clearer understanding of what they symbolized, but i’m not sure we did. maybe we thought we would pass certain things again and each sticker would serve to help us recognize those things in a future time? or maybe we thought that we would never pass certain things again and we wanted to mark them in recognition of having lived them in our past?

regardless of our reasons or our reasonlessness, what i love about this story now is that we looked out the window for the ordinary things, that we slowed down for happiness, that we let the regular stuff matter and that we ritualized the present moment. i want to pull off the road tonight and stick a little ladybug on the occasion of that bright, young wisdom.